Is there no place in the market for a High End (expensive) Console?

Tempest

I've been thinking about this for a while and also with my memories of days gone by with the, dare I say it, very existing days of new consoles hitting the news constantly.

If I go back 25 years, we had some consoles around the £400 mark, which I'd take a stab in the dark and suggest that would easy be £1000 in today's money.

Given that people are happily? paying out, easy £500  nowadays to get a mid-ish tier modern smartphone, some paying up to twice that amount.

If a company was brave enough to go, let's say "balls out" and work with Nvidia/AMD to develop some high end chippery, and ended up with a console in the £800 ish bracket that really kicked some serious butt. And given the ability to code for known/fixed hardware may leave most custom gaming PC's behind when it came to actual game performance.

Do you feel there would not be a market?

I'd certainly love to see something like that be made, for those who wanted the best.
It would be above, little Timmy's Christmas gift range of course, but just something to stand out at the high end.

Get us back to the good old days, when you actually had something to wish for, and stand there jaw on the floor at what something built with that price tag could achieve.

Greg Hook

Surely you would just get a PC in that case? The benefits of a console would be diminished at that price point.

Rocinate

Valve tried it with Alienware steam machines, it was marketed to be high end console. It's failed..

Steam Machines

In my opinion if you are spending that much people want full control of what goes in, similar to hifi separates and is certainly the case for myself when it comes to gaming.

Getinthehole!

It needs to be mass market for online play to be successful.

Tempest

Thanks for the replies.

I guess I'm not really thinking "Let's just cram a PC into a box and call it a console type console"
With all the legacy issues of x86 chips which have held PC's back for so long.

Were not Steam machines just PC's in a small box?

I can see the issue of Online Gaming, but that can be cross platform can it not?

I know what I'd like to see will never be build.
A bit like a company saying, ok. fresh sheet of paper, backwards compatible with nothing. Let's contact the chip makers and put together something totally custom hardware wise.

An impractical pipe-dream I guess

Consoles are too cheap, or rather, I wish there were more higher end ones. Or higher versions, a bit like what Msoft has done, but even higher.

Re the "might as well get a PC" viewpoint, well, a Console built to high end, with fresh hardware should leave any PC totally standing, if it's been designed from the ground up for game play and the coders know exactly the hardware they are writing for with zero worries about any compatibility issues.

I guess I'm frustrated a little at, well it can only be this good as we need to keep to a £399 price point for example, and there we are stuck for the next X years.

As I say people pay more each year for a phone than a console which lasts many years.

Of course, it would need to be something special, so special that it made anything on the market now look like an embarrassment.

JabbaNut

That was the old days of PC, when ever 16 months to 2 years, you upgraded the CPU and or GPU.
Today's high graphics games have high costs, needing large mass markets.

It is not the console but the controllers which can be standardised. That just leaves the piracy problem to be designed out.  Mass game copying killed the old PC gaming market. Gave rise to consoles.

Greg Hook

No console will ever leave all PC's standing. It might beat low/medium end ones if it was designed properly with decent components, but the development time for a console will mean by the time it comes out, most medium/high end PCs will wipe the floor with it.

Even if you designed a console today, using something ridiculous like two 1080Ti GPUs, by the time it came out in a year or two's time, the latest PC would beat it probably with just one of the latest top end GPUs.

Plus the more power you chuck into a console, the more cooling is required. You can't go too high end without everyone complaining about very noisy fans on all the time.

aoaaron

This is known as a PC.

Tempest

But a pc is held back by intel Intel and the need to be backwards compatible eith the x86 instruction set isn't it? I've heard that for years, that and the random mix of hardware everything has to allow for and get in the way.

I can't believe that if a team sat down with a blank sheet of paper and designed hardware from scratch  to play games / fast at polygon type graphics, with no constraints on being compatible with anything, they could not come up with something much faster and leaner than a pc with 37 years of baggage behind it.

Rcfman

Cloud computing, where the game is streamed. Then bandwidth is the bottleneck, processing power can be kept bleeding edge by the hosts. Surely that's the key as network infrastructure continues to grow?